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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9741162" data-attributes="member: 18">Oooof that's not great. Very interesting but not great!Especially as the Ottoman Empire... doesn't come from the middle east, it comes from Anatolia! Also its culture is really distinct from most of the major actual middle-eastern cultures of the medieval and renaissance era (despite ruling over them for much of that time - it also ruled over much of Eastern Europe and all of Greece). But definitely there's been stuff that painted them in a specifically Ottoman-esque light at times, including really, frankly racist stuff.Slavery is a good example, maybe the perfect example (kinda relevant to this thread!)You can say "Well medieval Europe didn't have slaves!" and that's kinda-true (not really but let's not go too deep, let's go with that), but you know what pretty much all of medieval Europe had? Serfs. Brutal obviously unfair nasty serfdom. For centuries the whole place was rife with it. You know what doesn't appear in "medieval European fantasy" settings at all, like even slightly? Serfdom. Because frankly, any 20th or 21st century person getting a close look at medieval European serfdom would say "Yo that's basically slavery wearing a hat and sunglasses!". And these romanticized settings just delete that because it would be a massive downer and it doesn't get anyone off (whereas <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism" target="_blank">for some reason</a> some people don't slavery as much of a downer, especially when they assign it to other cultures, and some people find it rather titillatory even - c.f. fascination with harems etc.). No-one is the Forgotten Realms is a serf, not even in the most directly faux-medieval areas like Cormyr, instead it's all stout freemen, yeoman farmers and the like. Free brave men living off the land in a curiously American 1800s West-like manner, strangely not impaired by the nobility at all. Nor are other constant horrors of medieval Europe present, but I think serfdom alone makes this particularly brand of racism clear. Because what does Calimshan have in spades? SLAVES. Why? Because for some guys in the 1980s or w/e that was the defining feature of the Ottoman Empire or the medieval middle east or w/e, and instead of romanticizing it out like they did with faux-Arthurian Britain (Cormyr), faux-Northern Britain (the Dales), faux-Ireland/Wales/Sweden (?!? what's the last one doing there? The Moonshaes anyway), faux-New York (Waterdeep), faux-Spain (Amn), and so on, they decided to keep it in and make it a big part of the culture. And this at the same time as they were aggressively romanticizing the European colonization of the Americas with Maztica lol.Going on from that, I don't really buy the "generic" theory personally, in part because I don't really buy that there's a "generic medieval European fantasy" either, because the fantasy that's described that way isn't really rooted in medieval Europe at all, but in modern, mostly American, pop-culture referents that are vaguely associated with medieval Europe (far more Prince Valiant than even say Le Morte de Arthur etc.), and random, mostly American-originated ideas about medieval Europe, usually stemming from really simplistic and often inaccurate understandings of medieval European history. Certainly almost nothing about the FR really evokes "medieval Europe" beyond some of the shallowest aesthetics. It's so distant and romanticized and filtered through an American lens (again I refer you back to Cormyrean peasants acting more like Midwestern farmers than medieval British peasants) That's not a really a critique of the Realms, which are kind of fascinating, but it certainly is one of the very concept of "medieval European fantasy" as an RPG subgenre (some fantasy novels hew a hell of a lot closer to the actual European middle ages, I would note - if you want to call say Tad Williams' work "medieval European fantasy" I think that's broadly accurate, if one notes the quasi-Japanese aesthetics of the Elves and so on).Also, trying to do "generic middle eastern" but excluding Arabia (and thus effectively much of the middle east, well beyond modern Arabia itself) is pretty damn wild. That's like trying to do "generic medieval European fantasy" and saying "But no French or British Isles stuff!". Wow. That's kind of a side-issue though.Wuxia isn't really "generic Chinese fantasy", it's a far more distinct and precise style than that. It's a certainly a form of historical fantasy, and, thankfully, as you point out, actually originates in China (and is pretty comprehensible to the West, not least because some was filtered through the very Western-influenced Hong Kong film-makers of the 1970s through 1990s).Feels to me like Schend, with the greatest respect, was basically demonstrating the problem pretty well there.</blockquote>

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